Minutes of ILUGC meet on 12th June 2004
The meet started as usual about 30 minutes late at 3.30pm.
TECH TALK:
Mr.Bharati started first session with lecture on advanced
programming. This will be a series of lectures and today the
first.
The first and most important part of programming namely
accepting command line arguments and parsing them was taken up
for discussion. All of us would have experienced the pain of
parsing command line options, validating the arguments etc. To
ease this there is a nice function called getopt.
getopt_long function returns the command line argument parsed
one at a time. It returns -1 after parsing all arguments. The
returned structure has form like
name is the name of the long option.
has_arg
is: no_argument (or 0) if the option does not take
an argument, required_argument (or 1) if the option
requires an argument, or optional_argument (or 2)
if the option takes an optional argument.
flag specifies how results are returned for a long
option.
val is the value to return, or to load into the vari?
able pointed to by flag.
A loop constructor like while and switch statements can be
combined to process the arguments like
while (1) {
c= = getopt_long (argc, argv, "abc:d:012",
long_options, &option_index);
if (c == -1)
break;
switch (c) {
case 0:
printf ("option %s",
long_options[option_index].name);
if (optarg)
printf (" with arg %s", optarg);
printf ("\n");
break;
.....
.....
}
}
With getopt Bharati chose to end the session promising more
stuff in following meets.
DISCUSSION
Next free discussions started. Raman started a small
discussion on swap based on the what went on in kernel mailing
list and slashdot.org. He said there are differing opinions about
swap required or not, whether it helps in speedup or slows down,
what should be the size of swap - religiously correct figure 2 x
RAM ?.
Almost all participant accepted that it depends on the type of
work done. In fact most have not seen swap being used at all. One
more opinion is less used pages of large programme will be
swapped out thus making room for active programmes and buffers
making the system throughput better. Raja explained the working
of virtual memory system and how swap takes place and how we
specifically tune to swap out portions of kernel itself, to
improve the performance.
QUESTION TIME
Next it was question time. Ankit from Vellore Institute of
Tech Vellore [we should thank him and his friends for coming to
the meet all the way from vellore], said is apache though
running, opening the pages through any browser returns only
error. His box is not on any network, its just http://localhost,
and returns unable to open the page. He earlier had squid proxy
running, when things were fine. He knocked off squid and from
that time onwards he is getting this problem. He was asked to
checkup a.What is in httpd log. b. Try telnet to port 80. c.Look
out for permissions on http root directories. If any one has any
clue please post in the list.
Karthik from TCS raised few doubts regarding mounting,
whether whole tree will be loaded or just root directory and how
linux file system stores the data - contiguous or not, where the
next page link information will be stored etc. Most of his doubts
were clarified.
ILUGC RELATED ISSUES-LINUX FESTIVAL
After question time, the discussion was about forthcoming
install fest. First agreed change was to call the event as 'Linux
Festival' to cover both installation and demonstration. Thanks to
Raja's effort Asan Memorial school in Egmore agreed to provide
the place. The date is tentative fixed for 10 and 11th July. If
the venue is engaged then it will be on 17 and 18th July (both
dates Sat & Sun).
Raja will confirm the date in few days on the mailing list.
The format of the festival will be
a. An installation, followed by demonstration of software,
setting modem up etc on a projector in Auditorium. This will
about one hour duration. This will be repeated 3 or 4 times
whose starting time will be fixed previously and
prominently announced.
b. There will be additional computers with volunteers, where
further information/discussion can take place
c. People can bring their computers, on which volunteers will
install. The distro will be left to volunteers to decide
based on the type of user (and volunteers experience).
d. CD's will be burnt and sold for nominal fee to be decided
later.
f. If some volunteer(s) is(are) willing, T-shirt business will
be taken up.
g. Funds: We have some fund left from last LDD, which may not
be sufficient. After assessing the expenditure list will
be posted with requirements if any.
It is also decided to have a meet next Saturday about
the Festival. This meet is for volunteers and not for tech
talk/discussion.
At present there are only 5 or 6 confirmed volunteers. As
more people are required mailing list will be posted with such a
request.
Mr.Bharati expressed his difficulty in continuing to be the
co-ordinator. This will be takenup in the list separately so that
proper thread is created in the list and discussed.
General:
The attendance was 19 [ unfortunately the attendance was
not taken]. There were 2 new entrants.
We are planning to stick to the present format of meeting
namely : 1.Tech Talk 2.Free Discussion 3.Question time
4.ILUGC Organisational matters. Comments & suggestions welcome.
Raman.P
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